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Monthly Archives: July 2013

I don’t recall my first experience playing video games, but I do remember a mixed bag of encounters with games from at least the age of three. As an ’80s baby, I didn’t get to spend a lot of time in video arcades. By the time I was old enough to really, cognitively play a video game, arcades were dying, although you could find the occasional arcade cabinet in the movie theater or other random places.

One of those random places was a local Mexican restaurant near my house, called Tijuana Junction. As a three-to-four-year-old kid, I had some difficulty pronouncing that, so I just called it “The Train,” because of the toy train that would go around the restaurant on the tracks that were in place near the ceiling. My parents also took to calling it that because of me. The Train is no longer in existence, unfortunately. And while I fondly remember eating their yummy burritos as a child, what I miss most is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles arcade cabinet. Continue reading →

You think you’re a good person. You think you know yourself — until you’re confronted with self-preservation and having to make decisions whose outcomes mean life or death for someone else.

It’s in these moments you realize you aren’t afforded the luxury of principles and that your philosophical ideals mean nothing. And once you’ve made a decision, your conscience interrogates your heart and mind, questioning whether or not it was the right one. You have to do what takes to live, but can you live with what it takes to survive? You don’t always have time to weigh the pros and cons, and you just have to react. And when someone suffers because of the decision you were forced to make, some will hold it against you, even knowing they’d have done the same thing. Continue reading →

When I started this blog it was my intention to focus on nothing but retro games (or SD games, as I like to call them). As I’ve gone along, I’ve realized there are certain topics that will take more time for me to appropriately address, and that leaves me somewhat sparse with content. I’ve also jumped back into a lot of contemporary games lately.

So after some thought, I’ve decided I’m going to broaden my focus for Backtracking and expand on what I want this blog to be. The focus here will now be on games in general, however, I do still intend to give a lot of attention to retro games. I just find myself experiencing a decent amount of contemporary games and wanting to write about them. Hopefully, changing things up a little bit will bring more content for you to read.

Thanks for your understanding, and I hope you enjoy all of the new content to come!